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Need to rename files and folders with invalid characters in the names

Hi All,

I have 1.6GB of files in a folder on a Linux server that I need to copy to a Windows 2003 server. The problem is that all the files and sub folder names have 2 colons (::) in them. Is there a script or command way to rename all these files and folders to replace the colons with a space or dash so I can copy them without the dreaded "Invalid filename" errors?

Here is a capture of some of the files/folders:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 20480 Apr 1 09:18 1141761865::Inforequest.doc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Apr 1 09:18 1143511838::temp
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 96 Apr 1 09:18 1143728379::Proposal
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1071616 Apr 1 09:18 1144183601::Vantage1.doc

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Ray Laureyns

man rename

rename should work for you. just changing what the example is to fit your situation should work.

Ok, maybe I'm missing something here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by emetib (Post 3495203)

man rename

rename should work for you. just changing what the example is to fit your situation should work.

Hi emetib,

Well, maybe I wasn not clear. I have thousads of files and folders that I need to rename in this folder. So simply usning rename I have not found a syntax that can do all the files and folder recursivly. I have seen some examples of using tr to truncate the files but I don't want to corrupt them.

Any other ideas?

Thanks

Ray Laureyns

Maybe something like this old kludge of mine? Modify to suite your needs ...

Code:

#!/bin/bash

# for this script we don't want " " as a separator

# so we don't confuse mv with "multiple arguments"

IFS=$'\n'



name=$1



# check for, and replace upper case letters if applicable

echo $name | grep -e [[:upper:]+]  > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $name |tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`

fi



# check for and delete leading spaces

echo $newname | egrep "^ +" > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $newname  |  sed "s/ *//"`

fi



# check for and delete leading spaces as presented by find

echo $newname | egrep "\./ +" > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $newname | egrep "\.\/ +" | sed "s/  *//" `

fi





# check for and delete trailing spaces

echo $newname | egrep " $" > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $newname  |  sed "s/  *$//"`

fi



# check for and delete other non-welcome characters

echo $newname | grep [:\(\)\&\'\!]  > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $newname | sed "s/[\(\)\&\'\!]/_/g" `

fi



# check for and replace all other spaces with "_"

echo $newname | egrep " " > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $newname  |  sed "s/ /_/g"`

fi



# should we have generated a caravan of underscores

# this should take care of it

echo $newname | egrep "_+" > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $newname  |  sed "s/__*/_/g"`

fi





# "_-_" ... another artefact to be taken care of

echo $newname | grep "_-_" > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $newname  |  sed "s/_-_/_/g"`

fi



# "," - I decided that I don't like those, either...

echo $newname | grep "," > /dev/null

if [ "$?" = "0" ]

then

    newname=`echo $newname  |  sed "s/,//g"`

fi







# if there were modifications, commit them

if [ "$name" != "$newname" ]

then

    echo "moving " $name $newname

    mv "$name" "$newname"

fi

Save as some scriptname, and then use with find; iterate over the directories
first, with increasing depth; then repeat with files.

find -type d -maxdepth 1 -exec savedscript "{}" \;
find -type d -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 2 -exec savedscript "{}" \;
find -type d -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 3 -exec savedscript "{}" \;
...

find -type f -exec savedscript "{}" \;

Cheers,
Tink

how are you ls those files? what are the options that you are using?